does anybody power off? Or just leave it running?

R

RedJamaX

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I have always been a moderate overclock kind of guy... For processors and graphics cards

For example:

Pentium III 733 to 1GHz
2.4 Core 2 Quad up to 2.66
3.3 i5-2500k up to 4.3

You get the point, these are pretty much the "expected" overclocking levels... They are fairly easy to achieve with air cooling (even the stock coolers in many cases), and always works from a cold boot.

I recently tried clocking my i5-2500k a little higher and I noticed something... I had started the overclocking after my machine had already been running for a day or two straight, most playing games... and I was able to get to 4.6 stable... and even got to 4.8 with the ability to play games, but Prime95 would always fail at that speed. I was happy at 4.6 for the day and decided I would just try again later to balance out the temps and voltage and find the sweet spot, so I shut down and called it a night... BUT... the next day, I powered on from a cold boot and ended up spending an hour just in order to finally get it back to the ASUS Auto-Overclock of 4.3...

On to the questions...

1. For those of you who get the much higher clock speeds, are you leaving your machine on ALL the time in order to sustain the clock speeds? Can you get to that really high overclock from a pure cold-boot... as in, "left the machine off overnight" kind of cold-boot??

2. If so... what would you say is the most significant factor in achieving a cold-boot extreme overclock? Chipset... PSU... Cooler? again, with all of those categories, I know that I am running mainstream / moderate level hardware. I have a Z68 board, Cooler Master CX750 PSU, and Cooler Master 212 Plus cooler.
 
I overclock and leave on the power saving features so the CPU will throttle down when the PC is sitting there doing nothing. I have no interest in trying for a higher clock and dealing with other issues.
 
ocellaris said:
I overclock and leave on the power saving features so the CPU will throttle down when the PC is sitting there doing nothing. I have no interest in trying for a higher clock and dealing with other issues.
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This is what I do as well. Works perfectly.
 
ocellaris said:
I overclock and leave on the power saving features so the CPU will throttle down when the PC is sitting there doing nothing. I have no interest in trying for a higher clock and dealing with other issues.
Click to expand...

That's been my position for years as well.. I only attempted it again recently because I have seen people get to 4.8 with the 2500k and some of the newer games I will be playing might benefit from the extra speed.

So you leave your PC running all the time, but with low power mode enabled... how much do you overclock? Based on your comment, I am guess it is in the "moderate" range that I described.
 
I overclock as high as I can go (stable) and leave CPU power saving on. I turn off the monitor and receiver when I'm not using it.
 
RedJamaX said:
That's been my position for years as well.. I only attempted it again recently because I have seen people get to 4.8 with the 2500k and some of the newer games I will be playing might benefit from the extra speed.

So you leave your PC running all the time, but with low power mode enabled... how much do you overclock? Based on your comment, I am guess it is in the "moderate" range that I described.
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4.4GHz on a 2500K. It's been at 4.4 so long I'm not sure if it's average or a bit under.
 
I power off and pull the cord :p
I'm on umm..z77 Ivy stuff right now..all power saving off..1 notch lower than what would be the max stable I could w/o overheating.
 
See my sig rig.

I power off every night. I usually only leave it on during the day when I am actually using it.

I will not run an overclock so high that it will not cold boot.

I also have all power saving features disabled in BIOS.

Having the CPU stay at a constant clock speed is definitely helpful in programs.

You get a smoother overall experience when compared to having the clock speed jump all over the place based on load.
 
I put mine on Sleep generally every night unless there is an update prompting me to Shut Down then I'll do that. I think it's good to restart every once in a while.

As for my overclock, I keep Cool n Quiet enabled and is 24/7 stable so idle cores are running at 1.4 GHz @ 0.85V so it's running nice and cool when not in use. I'll sacrifice a little speed in order to keep CnQ working because it makes a huge difference in power and heat savings.
 
MacLeod said:
I put mine on Sleep generally every night unless there is an update prompting me to Shut Down then I'll do that. I think it's good to restart every once in a while.
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This. Some programs get pissy after running sleep/wake a dozen times or so.
 
I go full off @ night, but keep on during the day with Teamviewer loaded up.

Sleep/Hibernate are not worth the trouble when your rig boots up in ~6-7 seconds.
 
I leave it on, since I like to listen to music before I go to sleep. Set it to sleep after an hour or two, to save power, since I usually fall asleep by then. Power saving features on, OC till unstable, then drop back a couple hundred mhz for stability (after increasing the voltage no longer yields gains/temps get too high).

Computer resumes in less than a second, literally (can hear the music play before the monitor even turns on), and I haven't had issues with ArchLinux resuming on this hardware, even with multiple resumes, so really no reason to turn completely off. I assume it's a deep sleep, because the power light doesn't blink like it does when I suspend Windows.

Edit: realized I didn't really answer either question. For higher multipliers, I haven't really noticed a difference between cool-vs-warm boot. For higher bclk overclocks I've noticed that it's usually less stable on cold-boots when you start pushing the envelope. For my current system (in sig), in particular, I've noticed that after a certain bclk it doesn't like to boot unless you first boot from a lower (but still high) bclk, then set it to the higher value after a successful boot. I've never gotten it fully stable at that high a clock, though, and the ahci controller can't handle it either, so I usually stick to lower bclk on this one.
 
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leave it on with about half of the power saving features enabled, my g3258 sips power when its not under full load, processors are getting to be pretty efficient
 
ocellaris said:
I overclock and leave on the power saving features so the CPU will throttle down when the PC is sitting there doing nothing. I have no interest in trying for a higher clock and dealing with other issues.
Click to expand...

I've had some issues with throttling as it fiddles with the voltages as well, so either it gives the cpu unneccessarily much juice or it doesn't give enough. With earlier bios versions on X58 and X79 (I was an early adopter of both platforms) I always had to disable any power saving features to get stable overclocks. But with later bios versions (about 1 year after release) I was able to re-enable speedstep and other power saving features without trouble, maintaining the same oc level that only worked with speedstep and turbo mode disabled earlier.
 
atp1916 said:
I go full off @ night, but keep on during the day with Teamviewer loaded up.

Sleep/Hibernate are not worth the trouble when your rig boots up in ~6-7 seconds.
Click to expand...

So true. I was working on a computer with near identical specs to my own last night, but it had a single HDD in it. Waiting over two minutes for it to cold boot was agony. Thank you SSD manufacturers for spoiling me with fast startup, shutdown, and program loads!

I run my 2500K at 4 GHz on stock volts (technically it may be a slight voltage bump, but my motherboard applies 1.25V to it by default at base clocks). I have it able to turbo up to 4.4 on a single core. My motherboard automatically adds a little voltage when it is at turbo speed on multiple cores (4.2 for 2, 4.1 for 3 cores active), but it generally stays just below 1.3V in these scenarios. I shut it down every night, unless there is some large download running (has anyone else noticed just how HUGE some Steam games have gotten?) and so far it always starts back up again the next time I power it on.
 
I run my 2600k @ 4.6Ghz with speedstep enabled. So it down clocks to 1300mhz (I think) when it is sitting idle. I leave my pc on probably 90% of the time, but it does get turned off if I'm going to be away for a few days. On those occasions, when i get home, I have never had a problem with cold booting it on my overclock. But maybe I'm only in the mid range with my overclock.
 
I actually did have cold boot problems with my i5-2500K @4.4Ghz occasionally, but I replaced the motherboard (Gigabyte GA-Z68X-UD3H-B3 to ASUS P8Z68-V Pro) and everything's been great since. I blame cheap power circuitry on the Gigabyte board. All the power saving stuff enabled and I turn it off when I'm not using it. I can overclock it to about 4.7-4.8 but I don't think the extra voltage it needs for those 300-400Mhz are worth it.
 
When overclocking, I always just left mine on. For the Core2's, went through a Q6700, Q9550, QX9650, E8700, E8600, E8500, E8400 and E7400. I found that if I was moderate with my voltage, the overclock stability would last longer, but if I was hard on it and really pushed the power on it, my overclock stability would change weekly... Pushing the voltage over stock at all will always cause degradation quicker since the stock voltages are all ready a little over expected ranges for stability at it's rated clock speeds.

I was a little easier on my first gen i7's. The i7 920 C0/C1 held up pretty well at 1.3v @ 3.8GHz for about 3 months, but after keeping it on and having the power features disabled, I was lucky to keep 3.2GHz at 1.28v... I noticed the newer the series, the quicker the degradation would happen when I ran my i5 3570K through the ringer pushing 4.7GHz @ 1.35v. I did the auto overclock on my i7 3770K and it was steady at 4.3GHz for about 8 months with only 1.25v. I have not even bothered with my i7 4790K, it does plenty at stock for now... and I also now turn off my PC when i'm not using it to save on electricity.
 
1. For those of you who get the much higher clock speeds, are you leaving your machine on ALL the time in order to sustain the clock speeds? No Can you get to that really high overclock from a pure cold-boot... as in, "left the machine off overnight" kind of cold-boot??Yes

Bottom line its either stable or its not.....if its not stable 100% i drop it till it is:)
 
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I've been using sleep to save on power. I have it set to an hour of no activity. My cooling system does run 24/7 though.

My old rig with a 3770k I'd run 24/7 since it was finicky to boot.
 
I turn my stuff off when I'll be leaving the house for more than an hour or so. My Xeon certainly runs cooler than my previous i7-920, but it can still warm up my place (and the tenant upstairs pays the power bill). Power saving might work if I wasn't on X58, they don't like to be any less than furnaces.
 
I turn off to save on consumed power and to prevent fire if I'm out of house, like others do. The system heats up almost immediatly
 
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